Civil wars and internal armed conflicts are commonly followed by transitional justice processes known, according to United Nations protocols, as Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR).Footnote 2 The traditional view of DDR suggests that it is a linear procedure, but in most cases these phases run simultaneously due to the continuation of military confrontation, or the presence of other insurgent or paramilitary organizations that remain active and provide strong incentives for highly skilled combatants to return to war.Footnote 3 Devising policies and providing support to former combatants in their adaptation to civilian contexts is fundamental to peace building and establishing emerging democratic societies. Lack of adequate support can hinder the termination of war.
However, despite the importance of reintegration, there are no standardized practices or clear benchmarks that indicate when or how a reintegration process has been successful, partly because reintegration programmes depend on the particularities of the context and the specific needs of the target groups for whom they are tailored.Footnote 4 Reintegration programmes focus on providing support for the process of change and adaptation of ex-combatants’ identities that is necessary for them to live in civilian contexts. But this focus suggests it is only those who demobilize and disarm who make a transition to civilian contexts. They must let go of themselves, of who they where, of the role they had and what they did, both good and bad. They must let go of who they loved and what they learned in order to become civilian citizens. According to this logic, civilians continue to live their lives as usual. They do not need to participate actively in this process of becoming something new: they do not receive institutional support and are not expected to transform and adapt themselves, to (re)integrate. However, civilians are also part of this transitioning process, since they too need to find ways to (re)integrate to the emerging social and political order that follows war. After all, the relationship between combatants and civilians is at centre stage in war, and it is also the main driver of conflict transformation processes.Footnote 5 In this article I examine the role of embodiment and secondary care in conflict transformation, and how creative processes that foster the practice of care cultivate change amongst all parties involved in post-conflict scenarios.
As I have argued elsewhere, the social reintegration of former combatants should be understood as a decades-long performative process that takes place in civilian contexts through the interplay between legal frameworks and policy-driven reiterative practices that regulate and make visible the mechanisms by which ex-combatants become new political subjects.Footnote 6 The reintegration process extends beyond the time frame of institutional assistance and unfolds over years of cultural, social and political transformations that determine the ways in which civilians and former combatants relate to each other. I consider that reintegration programmes go beyond providing essential support to ex-combatants; they also serve as liminal platforms that address structural and historical inequalities associated with the context in which violent conflict finds expression. Reintegration is therefore not just about supporting ex-combatants in the process of becoming civilians: it is a performative process of social transformation that takes place through embodied practices and affective transactions that characterize everyday life in transitional contexts. It is regulated by means of necessary institutional support and affects the lives of all citizens living in situations of protracted armed conflict. This process develops in, but mostly beyond, institutional settings, and strongly relies on the quality of the relationships between citizens, both civilians and ex-combatants. For reintegration to be successful, therefore, civilians and ex-combatants must make a transition together; they must learn how to see each other in a different light so that they can also learn how to relate to each other differently.
One way of approaching this task is by understanding the human body as an intersectional place for identifying relational patterns that can be considered and rehearsed towards adaptation where necessary, and movement as a tool to better understand affective transactions and emotional states that facilitate conflict-transformation processes. In this article I develop this understanding of performative reintegration by focusing on a pilot study conducted as part of my ongoing collaboration with the Colombian government, via the Reincorporation and Normalization Agency (ARN). The ARN was founded in 2003, after the collective demobilization of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) and is one of several government organizations dedicated to devising policies and implementing programmes that contribute to de-escalating the armed conflict in Colombia.Footnote 7 The current internal armed conflict started in 1948 due to civilian confrontations along partisan lines, and the first guerrilla organizations of Marxist and Guevarist influence were founded in 1964. Following years of slow military build-up, the 1980s saw a rapid increase in military activities alongside peace negotiations with fifteen guerrilla organizations, the formation of counterinsurgent or paramilitary organizations, and a thriving illegal narcotics industry that provided all armed actors with a steady flow of financial and military resources. During the 1990s partial demobilization processes required the creation of NGOs, government organizations and programmes aimed at providing logistical and human support in post-war recovery. The ARN is the current government organization responsible for formulating and implementing public policy on reintegration for adults, defined as citizens who are aged eighteen or above, and providing former combatants of both guerrilla and paramilitary organizations with essential financial and human support. Since its creation, 59,906 combatants have demobilized and 20,490 have completed the ARN institutional programme. In March 2018, 10,426 citizens were enrolled in the ARN.Footnote 8
The Performative Reintegration workshop I will discuss here was run in Bogotá, the Colombian capital, in October 2015. The workshop lasted three days and was tailored for thirteen reintegration tutors (rather than ex-combatants themselves), and one female ex-combatant working for the ARN.Footnote 9 Conducted during a fieldwork visit to my home country of Colombia, the purpose was twofold: to test a methodological approach aimed at enhancing reintegration care, and to identify possible pathways for future stages of the collaboration. The duration of the activities and the number of participants reflected the ARN work dynamics and resources available to facilitate the workshop.Footnote 10 Participants were invited to be part of the pilot study through an open call for expressions of interest circulated by the ARN. Participation was voluntary, and ARN employees did not receive any payments or work benefits for attending. My decision to work with reintegration tutors (civilians) instead of solely ex-combatants built on my previous experience working as a reintegration care provider with female ex-combatants and former child soldiers, and responded to the ARN's interest in providing reintegration tutors with opportunities for developing self-care strategies.Footnote 11 Additionally, working with reintegration tutors or facilitators responded to my interest in the quality of the relationships between ex-combatants and reintegration tutors, and concerns regarding the place of institutional care and the sustainability of arts-based interventions in violent-conflict transformation. The workshop turned out to be unexpectedly productive, with minor impediments to its smooth realization that were, in retrospect, also instructive.Footnote 12
In order to show how this happened, in the first section of this article I will lay out the conceptual and contextual elements of my collaboration with the ARN, outlining the initial stages of our partnership, a workshop in 2011, in order to identify the main points of conflict that have shaped our work together. I will then move on to discuss the structure and delivery of the 2015 Performative Reintegration workshop in order to illustrate how embodied practice contributes to transforming the relational patterns between reintegration tutors and persons in the process of reintegration. By focusing on participants’ critical responses to two types of activity that highlighted some of the most distinctive features of the workshop, I will outline the main conceptual aspects revealed through practice, and illustrate how an enhanced awareness of the interplay between care and embodiment can harness more resilient facilitation.Footnote 13 In the closing section of the article I will discuss the current stage of our partnership.
Collaborating with a government organization: the interplay between applied theatre and conflict transformation
Writing about his work in war contexts, the peace-building practitioner John Paul Lederach suggests that all conflict manifests in the ‘quality and flow’ of human relationships and proposes a transformational approach that focuses on improving how conflicted parties relate to each other.Footnote 14 In a similar vein, James Thompson proposes an ‘aesthetics of care’ in applied-theatre projects that is attentive to inter-human relations.Footnote 15 Focusing on the importance of listening and the quality of relationships in applied theatre and community-based projects, however, Thompson seems to overlook the fact that engaging in active listening with the communities that one intends to work with and prioritizing their needs over academic interests are the necessary first steps to advancing an informed and mutually beneficial collaboration, not solely a strategy to avoid what he terms an overly critical approach that characterizes academic writing and some applied theatre practice.Footnote 16 Investing time to notice the ‘web of relationships’ that frames their work enables practitioners to devise strategies that contribute to more resilient facilitation practice.Footnote 17
I began working with ex-combatants in 2011 after a few months of seeking opportunities to use art practice to assist victims of the armed conflict in Colombia. I was especially interested in working with internally displaced persons (IDPs) to provide support in dealing with loss and coping with the challenges of resettlement in urban contexts. I did not reflect on my underlying motivations to work with IDPs at that time, but I realized later that I had been influenced by my own upbringing: in the early 1990s family friends were forcibly displaced, kidnapped and/or murdered by members of the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the threat of similar situations resulted in the internal displacement of my grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles to several cities in Colombia.Footnote 18 In the early 2000s, some moved abroad as asylum seekers. The year 2011 also marked a turning point in the narrative of violence in the country with the government's acknowledgement of an internal armed conflict and the proliferation of various institutional initiatives to assist those impacted by it.Footnote 19 There was also an emerging interest in how to employ the arts in such contexts, but no clear pathways on how to do so. I was a performance artist at that time working on individual and collaborative projects as an international troupe member of La Pocha Nostra (2006–13). I was also a dance teacher with ten years of experience as a ballerina, as well as in several bellydance styles (Lebanese, Egyptian cabaret and classical Egyptian). With my artwork and dance background I started exploring narratives of political violence and identity through performance, video performance, and site-specific and video installations. But I was mostly interested in finding sustainable pathways for employing the arts to work with communities directly affected by the narratives that I was investigating. Working as a practising artist in the Colombian context did not provide the right platform for me to engage with communities in a way that I considered would be productive and beneficial in the long term. Therefore, during my 2011 search I found an opening at the ARN to work with female ex-combatants of guerrilla and paramilitary organizations in their social-reintegration process. I joined the organization through a volunteering programme called Time Bank, which enabled people to ‘donate time’ to teach skills or help ex-combatants to work through difficulties experienced during their adaptation to civilian life.
Learning how to navigate a new social context and coping with the inevitable changes that the adaptation entails is a similar challenge for both former combatants and IDPs, however divergent their specific backgrounds might be. When I approached the Time Bank programme I considered that embodied practice could provide opportunities to explore the creative potential of former combatants and was interested in identifying how this could contribute to their process of adapting to civilian life. Following dance movement therapist Mary Starks Whitehouse, I believe that the creative potential of individuals is not limited to the possibility or capacity of producing something such as a drawing, a sculpture or a play: ‘the basic creativity of the human being consists in working towards his own fullest development, the realizing of its own potentials, the allowing himself to grow. What we create first is ourselves and it is out of ourselves that the producing comes’.Footnote 20 Accordingly, I considered that the Time Bank programme provided a good opportunity to explore how creative processes could contribute to improving ex-combatants’ everyday lives. The ARN had staged performances exploring ideas and experiences of survival, resilience, rescue and reconciliation, with a strong emphasis on wide public visibility.Footnote 21 This type of performance project brings together members of receiving communities, victims of violence and former combatants. Strong emphasis is placed on the final performance, and thus all the resources are devoted to delivering a ‘high-quality’ artistic product. Once the performance is over, however, the participants go back to their lives as they were, with no support to continue their creative work or expand the potential benefits that it might have in their communities. In this first approach to the ARN, and guided by the ideas of Starks Whitehouse, therefore, I was mostly interested in exploring the process of encounter that could be facilitated through art practice, the potential rediscovery of oneself through symbolic interaction, and I, a civilian, understood myself as part of that encounter.
After several meetings with ARN staff to identify their needs and our shared areas of interest I proposed a dance workshop aimed at generating awareness of interdependence, self-respect and promoting assertive communication. Unfortunately, the workshop with the ARN was a disappointment: it had been planned to run for three days a week over two weeks, but we were only able to hold two sessions. On the third day, when I arrived to facilitate the workshop, they were painting the room that we had been assigned in a beautiful royal blue: the smell was so intense that it was impossible to breathe, and the ARN staff responsible for supervising my work did not show up – I was never told why.
In my view, there were multiple reasons for the failure. I had over a decade of experience as a dancer and dance teacher, and some intuitive understanding of the political and social implications of working on peace-building efforts in Colombia, but I did not know enough about the institution or about the target group: I was unaware of the wider political and institutional performance that framed my practice.Footnote 22 I did not know exactly what kind of support the ARN provided to its beneficiaries; which other government institutions were involved in the process; or, considering the long history of violence of the country, what the political and social view of reintegration processes was from a long-term peace-building perspective. On the other hand, the ARN staff did not seem to be interested in learning about my ideas regarding the potential role of art practice in the adaptation process of individuals to new contexts. They saw the workshop as an opportunity for public engagement and to make their work visible, as earlier projects had. The ARN seemed primarily to want to show the general public they were doing important and innovative work, and we both failed to ask each other enough questions about how our experiences could be mutually nurtured.
My reluctance to participate in a public-engagement use of the arts was also informed by safety concerns. In a deeply polarized country I thought that it was inappropriate for a government institution to suggest inviting the press to take photos and interview participants, and in so doing expose the identities of people who could consequently be targeted by the armed organization they had belonged to, or by other afflicted parties. I also felt that I could have potentially been in danger due to a lack of public understanding about the role of the institution, or also mistakenly tagged as a guerrilla or paramilitary supporter. I feared that ex-combatants could be vulnerable if they had not disclosed their previous involvement with armed organizations to their neighbours and employees and were identified as such through the media. I was concerned about their being stigmatized and feeling vulnerable in their own homes, as is commonly the case in transitional contexts.Footnote 23 These concerns about the vulnerability of ex-combatants were not unfounded; they sometimes have to deal with death threats and other security issues. Over the years, the ARN has developed strict security protocols that they implement when working with their beneficiaries, but they also engage in public engagement practices that might inadvertently affect their duty to protect their target population. All these elements needed to be part of the conversation on how to promote the workshop.
However, despite the difficulties, this was an extremely valuable encounter with the institutional complexity of reintegration. I realized that if we were going to work together again we would need time to discuss our expectations. I needed to get a better sense of the support provided by the institution and its priorities, and also of the needs of ex-combatants. We both needed to appreciate what we could do together, and not place each other in positions to which we could not, or did not want to, respond. Time and these conversations have made possible the Performative Reintegration pilot study.
Stillness, improvisation and collaborative work
Reintegration care providers are essential to the individual and collective efforts that facilitate ex-combatants’ reintegration. Since 2015, ex-combatants enrolled in the ARN reintegration programme (known as persons in the process of reintegration, or PPRs) have been assigned personal tutors who supervise and provide support and guidance. The tutor-to-PPR ratio is about one to fifty. The current reintegration programme consists of eight dimensions – security, personal, productive, family, habitat, health, education, citizenship – which are explored and planned in regular consultation sessions between PPRs and their reintegration tutors. The body, however, seems to occupy a secondary role as it is not intentionally engaged during their discussions. In the pilot study I focused on how a conscious engagement of the body in the delivery of reintegration care assistance could enhance the process and, in turn, by working towards an increased awareness of the role of the body in care practices I also supported facilitators in noticing how, through the delivery of care, they can engage in self-care practices, which are not currently available in the institution. In the remainder of this article I will discuss how we addressed this institutional challenge of providing care for caregivers through performance practice.
The Performative Reintegration workshop created a space for exploration comprising multiple individual bodies working towards an embodied understanding of care and collectivity. The main lines of enquiry were notions of individual and collective bodies, collaborative work and teamwork, coresponsibility and codependence, identity and trust, vulnerability, and love and respect. Drawing on improvisation-based choreographic practice, dance-movement therapy and performative devising strategies, the methodological structure aimed at rationalizing affective responses to performance practice utilizing guided discussions. Each session started with collective definitions of key concepts using word games and employed a variety of staring exercises that allowed participants to slow down and take note of their bodily reactions and surroundings. The concepts’ definitions worked as a baseline that would be explored working with a combination of stillness, collective dance and movement-based improvisations. The baseline was revisited each day at the end of the session in order to identify whether and how creative practice had shifted participants’ understandings of the main lines of enquiry.Footnote 24 The layering of these activities and constantly returning to stillness aimed at creating space for participants to notice and reflect on how they related to each other, and how the quality of these relationships compared to their consultations with ex-combatants.
The choreographer Emilyn Claid suggests that slowing down to practise stillness allows us to become more alert. She argues that stillness is a ‘resource for discovery’, a quality of movement that enables us to notice ourselves; to realize how we interact with each other and how we prepare, feel and react when meeting others.Footnote 25 Claid suggests that when we practise stillness in dance we engage in a complex work of noticing numerous mind–body reactions and sensations, and that by thinking through stillness dancers can learn how to work with their bodies rather than against them in the process of noticing the ways in which they are habituated to movement, and of shifting these movement pathways.Footnote 26 The activities that encouraged the practice of stillness sought to facilitate a process of increased bodily awareness of the relationship between individual bodies, and also in relation to the room where the workshop took place. By focusing on stillness, participants worked to slow down and prepare themselves to meet each other, with curiosity and respect. The practice of stillness enabled reintegration tutors to notice how they prepare to approach each other, to notice the quality of their encounters and the bodily and affective responses triggered by each process of encounter.
Participants also engaged in a series of activities involving physical contact that prepared them to critically reflect on the quality of their relationships with their tutees. To begin, they would take time looking at each other and noticing their physical sensations and feelings triggered by this act of observation. Contact-based activities then provided participants with a shared embodied experience as a basis for discussing trust, fear, pain and care. First, by engaging in thoughtful explorations of their partners’ bodies using all their senses, reintegration tutors rehearsed multiple ways of caring for each other and themselves. I asked participants to take turns to allow themselves to be explored and cared for, to be curious in their explorations and to notice how they could communicate when their own personal limits were being crossed. Allowing themselves to be cared for by others helped participants to recognize that their reintegration tutees were very vulnerable in their consultations, and that noticing their personal limits through embodied practice was important to address self-care strategies during our discussions. Participants decided to trust each other in this exercise and were able to build on their thoughts regarding the practice of stillness to discuss further possible ways of creating safe environments so that ex-combatants could feel safe within their own vulnerability.
The combination of stillness and physical contact allowed participants to notice how body language was an essential aspect of secondary care and that thoughtful use of touch and eye contact could ease the interaction with their tutees. Each day participants worked with their reintegration tutees before or after attending the workshop, and when they were asked to reflect on whether the workshop affected their professional practice, one tutor said that the activities had made him more sensitive in his interactions with his tutees. The repetition and variations of staring exercises helped participants realize that it was important not to project their own ideas, dreams and desires on the person that they were interacting with, but instead that by allowing themselves to observe and be observed, they could learn how to listen to their own bodies and to prepare themselves to notice what their partner's movements communicate in combination with their words, or through their silences. Something that might seem obvious to performance, dance and theatre scholars and practitioners was expressed as a new discovery by one of the participants: ‘that our bodies speak, that you are part of your own story, and that your body is part of that story’.Footnote 27 Realizing that our bodies communicate helped participants understand how small changes in their interaction, such as the quality of their handshake or establishing eye contact with their tutees, could help in the development of trust and safety in situations of vulnerability. These feelings and acknowledgement of shared vulnerability facilitated by the workshop characterize in significant ways the delivery of reintegration assistance, and also the societal process of transformation that reintegration entails.
Writing about the use of dance as a resource for facilitators in the field of conflict transformation, political scientist Emily Beausoleil suggests that subtle changes in posture, gestures or quality of movement have a direct influence on the emotional state of people in conflict.Footnote 28 Some of the reactions of participants, offered in a recorded discussion at the end of the day, reflected this influence. One of the reintegration tutors commented,
I was able to understand that the way in which we look at each other can deconstruct any kind of aggressiveness that one might be holding inside. I learnt that I can communicate using my body language and that I can demonstrate [to my tutees] that if I am not being judgemental, he or she can trust [me], and that [former combatants can] allow themselves the opportunity of being explored, and that that exploration will be respectful. That if we [reintegration tutors] have the power to create a space to ask and try to discover many things about someone, we must make sure that the person that we are talking to feels confident, comfortable, so that they can allow themselves to trust and that if they are vulnerable in the moment when they are with us, it is ok to be vulnerable because there is no risk of harm in that space.Footnote 29
Other participants discussed how the practice of stillness helped them become aware of biases and difficulties in their interactions with ex-combatants. A reintegration tutor realized that ex-combatants’ postures and facial expressions affected the ways in which she interacted with them, echoing several tutors’ concerns regarding their own fears and biases towards the community for which they provide care. The latter were interpreted and discussed as protection mechanisms in anticipation of the emotional challenges that the job entails, and as a strategy implemented by reintegration tutors to prepare and protect themselves against failure and the difficulties of reintegration. Some participants suggested that these mechanisms of protection in relation to the emotional labour of reintegration prevented them from actively engaging with former combatants through respectful and thoughtful bodily interactions that could contribute to building trust, acknowledging and honouring the individual needs of their tutees. One participant said,
Some of them [ex-combatants] have wounds and scars in their bodies, and they hide them. Some have this body posture [silence]. They are always frowning, and that is giving us information regarding their own burdens, what they bring with them. And sometimes one does not see the person for what she is, but instead one projects one's own fears, as a reintegration tutor. So I think that [the activities] allow us to observe the other person [silence]; because they [former combatants] are always assessing how much we trust them, how much we believe in them. I think that it is beautiful to be able to communicate these things [through our bodies].Footnote 30
Trust, as this reintegration tutor suggests, is a two-way engagement because former combatants are also observing their tutors, listening to their words, reading their movements and gestures in order to assess whether they can trust them or not, and also whether the reintegration tutor believes in them, especially in those moments when they do not believe in themselves. The practice of stillness and conscious engagement of their bodies in the activities that encouraged physical contact helped workshop participants notice that an awareness of this two-way engagement was crucial for building trust and improving communication with their tutees. The self-reflective quality of performance practice as it was understood in the workshop encouraged participants to become aware of what was happening around them, how they responded and, most importantly, how they were inevitably implicated in the context.
The second type of activity included in the workshop involved movement-based improvisation and collaborative devising. These creative explorations of the space facilitated through the improvisations encouraged participants to reflect on the importance of teamwork and its relationship with the material precariousness of facilitation in conflict transformation. Collective embodied practice also encouraged them to meet each other and acknowledge each other's presence in a different way. First, I guided them through dance-based improvisation exercises that relied for success on each participant's willingness to contribute. Group-led dance improvisation helped participants to think about themselves as members of a collective body, a fluid structure in which they could find support and a creative impulse. Some participants expressed how the playfulness of dance practice encouraged them to trust more in themselves, and to realize that they were able to conduct activities and confront challenges in ways that they had not thought were possible. This was an extremely important insight considering that persons in the process of reintegration need to believe and trust that they can do things differently, in ways that they might think are not possible, or that they consider that they are incapable of doing, such as studying, learning how to express themselves and deal with their feelings in constructive ways, or to secure a job. It was also a significant realization for civilians who might be reluctant to change their views on former combatants. In this vein one participant noticed that it was important for them to see their tutees in a different light. The metaphor of darkness was implemented by participants to illustrate how former combatants can feel at a loss in civilian contexts, and reintegration assistance was conceptualized as a strategy to help them ‘to come out of the darkness that they are living in, especially those who have just arrived [in civilian life]’.Footnote 31 One participant suggested that the activities involving dance improvisation made her consider that when confronted by fear and limitations she could take risks and simultaneously work towards trusting herself and others. Another participant indicated that the playfulness of the dance-based activities made her realize that she could move away from painful narratives to revisit and explore past life experiences and future possibilities with her tutees. This offered an important insight into how to engage with a painful or difficult past without focusing solely on the memories or events that might continue to inflict harm. The process helped some participants to think about themselves and their tutees as co-creators of the reintegration experience that takes place in each of their tutoring sessions, and beyond. Overall, participants discussed how the support provided by tutors could potentially help ex-combatants to be kind to themselves and to try different paths for reintegration, without allowing fear and the possibility of failure to prevent them from acting.
Taken together, these activities aimed at reflecting on how performance practice can contribute – or not – to improving the reintegration process, and critically exploring how interweaving words with movement, and redefining the meaning of the former through touch, play and thoughtful interaction, enabled participants to gain an awareness of how the body informs secondary care. Building on this relational questioning and redefinition in practice, we aimed at ‘transforming’ quotidian exchanges and also at creating new models of coexistence and interaction that could be ‘transported’ and experienced, however differently, in everyday life.Footnote 32 The facilitation of this workshop during regular ARN working hours allowed us to discuss the effect that our collaborative work was having on participants’ professional practice. Their insights on how the creative work influenced their tutoring also revealed how the interplay between trust and vulnerability is a key aspect of the reintegration process.
Closing thoughts
In this article I have discussed how embodied practice can help care providers and conflict transformation practitioners slow down, notice themselves and rehearse different ways of relating to each other and to those for whom they are responsible. This relational focus in applied theatre and conflict transformation aims at devising strategies that contribute to more resilient facilitation practice. I have highlighted the importance of identifying shared interests with the communities and intuitions that we intend to work with before engaging in any collaboration. In so doing, I intend to emphasize how critical it is to allow enough time to identify these, and to allow for some purposeful and thoughtful experimentation in devising sustainable arts-based interventions when working with communities that have been significantly affected by war. By fostering the practice of care the Performative Reintegration workshop created a temporary platform through which reintegration tutors could critically reflect on the quality of the relationships between them and their tutees. This temporary platform also allowed them to envision and implement strategies to improve their professional practice.
During our discussions it became clear that participants realized the importance of bodily transactions in their professional practice, and that they could rehearse ways to improve and provide better assistance to former combatants. A recurring theme during the workshop was the need to provide care strategies for care providers. Several participants mentioned how concerns about the importance of the physical and emotional well-being of facilitators were recognized at an institutional level, but little was done to provide consistent support to facilitators. Creative interventions that allowed them to reflect on their own professional practice were appreciated, but very scarce, and the limited understanding of how these interventions could have a direct influence in the quality of reintegration assistance made it difficult for facilitators and policy makers to envision how these creative interventions could potentially be articulated within long-term work. This workshop helped us all to notice and appreciate the importance of engaging in purposeful explorations using creative practice to identify the potential of such interventions in the long term. It also advanced the institutional conceptualization of the multiple ways in which art practice can be beneficial for the ARN, beyond public engagement activities.
Reflecting critically on this workshop in the course of writing this article has contributed to laying the groundwork for a new stage of the ARN collaboration, which started in August 2018.Footnote 33 The concerns regarding the sustainability of creative work within policy-implementation mechanisms that were identified as a shared area of interest through the planning, implementation and follow-up of the workshop motivated us to seek opportunities to advance performance and creative practice as core elements of transitional justice and conflict transformation processes. We continue to work together in order to realize this goal.
